Tolstoy devoted his afternoons to his guests. In the morning he was, in principle, invisible. lie withdrew at dawn to the vaulted ground-floor chamber in which lie had made his study. The walls were fortress-thick and kept out all outside noises. Light fell softly from two high, narrow barred windows. The furniture was composed of one large table, a few old chairs covered with imitation black leather, a simple bookcase and a hard, narrow divan. A scytlic and saw leaned against one wall. A basket of cobbler's tools lay on the floor. In this lair Tolstoy wrote or made boots, depending on his mood. Just then, he was working on a story, Father Sergey, making notes for a future novel (entitled, for want of anything better, Koni's Story, after the friend who had supplied the subject) and composing religious articles such as The Kingdom of God Is Within You. He admitted into his inner sanctum an occasional artist, who had begged permission to sec him at work, pen in hand; Rcpin painted a portrait of him writing, and Ginzburg sculpted a bust. Both were aware of the honor that had been conferred upon them. Repin also painted Tolstoy standing barefoot in the grass. The model did not like this picture. "Why not paint me without my pants, while he's at it?" he grumbled.
Toward midsummer, alarming news readied Yasnaya Polyana: an unusually prolonged period of drought had brought famine to some of the
f Fet was to die the following year.
central and southwestern provinces of Russia. A number of people, including the author Leskov, came to ask Tolstoy whether he did not think something should be done to help the suffering peasants. The master was annoyed by this appeal to charity—to begin with, because he had not had the idea first, and then because, together with the muzhik-philosopher Syutayev, he had long condemned private charity as a cheap means for the wealthy to ease their consciences, and lastly because, according to him, the principle of "non-resistance to evil" should apply to natural disaster as well. His reply to his colleague was sententious:
"There are crowds of customers for operations of this type [aid to the starving]: people who have lived all their lives without a thought for the common people, often disgusted by and disdainful of them, and who, at the drop of a hat, are consumed by solicitude for their inferior brothers. . . . Their motives are conceit, vanity and fear of the people's anger. ... To fight famine, all that is ncccssary is for men to do more good deeds. A good deed does not consist in giving bread to feed the famished, but in loving the famished as much as the overfed. Loving is more important than giving food. . . . Therefore, since you ask me what must be done, I reply: awaken, if you can (and you can), the love of men for one another, not now when there is a famine, but always and everywhere."8
Excerpts from this letter were published and aroused a storm of indignation in other newspapers. Tolstoy was called a "heartless doctrinarian." He himself, upon learning that the famine was growing worse, felt his paper turn to ash in the heat of reality. On September 19, 1891 he decided he would take his daughter Tanya and go to his brother's place at Pirogovo to investigate the extent of the damage and seek a remedy. In response to Sonya's ironic smile at his sudden devotion to a cause erstwhile held in contempt, he snapped, "I beg you not to imagine I am doing this in order to get talked about; the fact is that I simply can't stop thinking about itl"
She let him go, noting, "If he were doing it because his heart bleeds at the sufferings of the starving, I would fall on my knees before him, no sacrifice would be too great. But I didn't feel and do not feel that his heart was in it. I only hope he may move others by his pen and his clcvemess."
He toured the villages around Pirogovo, realized the extent of the disaster and planned an article on the famine. In October he decided to leave his wife in Moscow and return, taking his daughters Tanya and Masha—this time to the province of Ryazan where his friend Raycvsky was struggling heroically to organize emergency relief. Sonya
was horrified when he told her of his plan: "To spend the whole winter separated from them, and to think of them twenty miles from the nearest station, Lyovochka with his stomachaches and intestinal pains and the two little girls completely on their own! . . The "little girls'' were not overjoyed either, but for different reasons. As good Tolstoyans, they considered—especially Tanya—that after condemning philanthropy, their father should not begin to champion it. "We are about to leave for the Don," wrote Tanya on October 26, 1891. "I am not looking forward to this trip and am feeling completely unenthusiastie about it, because this action of Father's is inconsistent; it is not right for him to handle funds, take in gifts and ask Mother for the money he has just turned over to her. ... lie says and he writes (and I agree with him) that the people's hardships stem from the fact that they are robbed and exploited by us, the landowners, and that the whole point is not to rob them any more. That is right, and Papa did what he said, he stopped robbing them. In my opinion, there is nothing more for him to do. . . . He is too much in the public eye, he is too severely judged, to settle for second best when he has already reached first best."t
Despite this lack of spirit in the "troops," the father, his two daughters and his niece Vera Kuzminskaya went to Begichevka, the Rayevsky property in the government of Ryazan. When they arrived, after a tiring two-day train and sledge trip, they were overwhelmed by the miser}' they saw. Many peasants had died of starvation. Others had fled to seek work elsewhere. The survivors, dull-eyed skeletons, were too weak to move. Tattered children with swollen stomachs, their faces blue with cold, dozed on heaps of rags inside glacial isbas. There was no wood, so they burned the thatch off the roofs. Further rationalization was impossible in the facc of such privation. Tolstoy and his daughters went to work alongside Rayevsky.
Tolstoy bought firewood with the first money Sonya advanced, and organized the baking of brown bread. Then he set up free kitchens in the villages. "The mothers bring their children and feed them, but eat nothing themselves," Tanya wrote on November 2, 1891. "If those who are giving money to this cause could see their gifts going directly to help the victims, they would be amply rewarded for their sacrifices."
The kitchens multiplied rapidly. Tolstoy made his headquarters at Begichevka, in the Rayevsky home. From there he set out every day on horseback to visit the surrounding hamlets, make lists of the needy, supervise the fair allotment of supplies, clothing and firewood. His
| In English in the original.
daughters helped him unstintingly. His sons, too, joined the relief workers in other districts: Sergey and Ilya were in Chern, Leo in Samara.
Every evening when he returned to Bcgichcvka, freezing and exhausted, Tolstoy commented on the day's incidents to his daughters and the team of volunteers he had assembled. Some, like Tanya, reproached him for compromising himself by accepting gifts from persons who were part of the "System" and therefore despicable. He admitted, with tears in his eyes, that his present activities were not in harmony with his principles. But at the same time he said he could not stand by and do nothing when the people were in such a plight.
From afar, Sonya herself began to be affected by this compassion that had outweighed personal interest in her husband. In Moscow, where she was detained by her four younger children—Vanichka, Andrey, Michael and Sasha—her throat ached as she read her husband's letters from the front and the searing articles he was writing for the newspapers. After finding it unthinkable that he should leave her alone "for the whole winter," she now began to wish she could help him. Seated at the dining-room table with her own children, she imagined those of others in rags, dying of hunger, and felt the injustice of her own good fortune. "We have no contact with the people," she wrote. "We share in none of their misery, we help no one. ... I feci sorry for myself and my children, who are being morally stifled in this atmosphere and are deprived of all spiritual activity. What can I do?" For the first time in her life she felt tempted to convcrt to Tolstoyism. One sleepless night she resolved to make an appeal to public charity. She wrote her letter in a rush of emotion, showed it to a few friends, who liked it, and took it in person to the editors of the Russian News. On the following day, November 3, it appeared in full in that newspaper: